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Thursday, January 29, 2015

Will Healthcare Data Breaches Be Worse in 2015?

2014 was a year that data breaches consistently remained
in the headlines. No business was safe as we saw many industries from home
improvement to entertainment fall victim. The healthcare industry accounted for
42 percent of all reported data breaches in 2014. With healthcare leading any
other industry in data breaches, the FBI’s Cyber Division warned the entire
healthcare industry that their security practices are falling short compared to
other industries. Many reports are now suggesting that healthcare organizations
should expect to see more data breaches in 2015 with even bigger and more
costly violations that ever before.

A report released by Experian, a global information services
firm, cites in its second annual data breach forecast that because of the
growing entry points to protected healthcare information such as mobile
devices, wearables, and other new technologies, the healthcare industry will be
more vulnerable than ever before. Other reports revealed that a widespread lack
of confidence in securing protected health information (PHI) will place a
bigger target on healthcare.

With the big push to move all patient healthcare and
personal information into digital format in recent years, the industry has
become a primary target for hackers. Two motivating points were made by
Consultancy IDC’s Health Insights unit in their annual top 10 predictions for
healthcare. First, by the year 2020 about half of all digital healthcare data
will be unprotected, the second, that healthcare organizations will experience
at least one and as many as five cyber-attacks in 2015 versus 2014.

Experts say that attacks will not only grow to be more
complex, but will become even simpler for hackers to commit moving forward.
Today, attackers are using social media to hunt for better targets and
expanding the attack surface to include Wi-Fi-enabled devices that are running
vulnerable firmware. Attackers can now even rent the entire infrastructure that
is needed to run online cyber scams easily without the required knowledge that
it used to take to be successful. With 2015 expected to see record cyber-attack
numbers, is your organization prepared?